Johannes Wohnseifer presents the fictitious elements of an attempted assassination. Based on the story of the man who tried to kill president Ronald Reagan - John Hinckley – it presents him as pleading 'not guilty' based on the fact that he saw the movie 'Taxi Driver' by Martin Scorsese so many times that it was an 'Irresistible Impulse' for him to try to kill the president of the United States. With these works Johannes Wohnseifer is presenting the viewer with the links between real life and fiction in our culture, showing the influences that fictional and the real world have on each other and that very often the line between reality and fiction gets blurred in the process.Wohnseifer’s portrait shifts uncertainly between charming artistic sketch and police composite drawing. Labelled “Acquired directly from the artist”, Wohnseifer writes himself into the narrative as co-conspirator, idle bystander, trauma groupie. Through documenting the aesthetics of cultural anxiety, Wohnseifer’s media-style images become unwittingly self-validating.

Johannes Wohnseifer’s Diamond is painted with comic mysticism: its corporate logo a meditative fixation, accompanied by a haiku-like slogan. Humorously playing on spiritualism as a by-product of global enterprise, Wohnseifer’s Diamond places advertising as the new religious art, extolling the virtues of faceless powers. Glossy, smooth and surface-perfect, this painting’s vacuous sentiment is replicated as echoing sublimity. Each work in this series has the same format: poster-sized paintings formalising subversive signs - themselves desirous commodities, loaded with philosophical meaning.Johannes Wohnseifer’s paintings hijack ready-made cultural signifiers and reassemble them as invented logos. Both comically absurd and ideologically threatening, his paintings infuse the frivolity of advertising with an underlying propaganda and cultural hierarchy. Packaging subversive messages with high art impunity, Wohnseifer uses the language of consumerism as a means to signpost personal identification within a contemporary zeitgeist. Remastering their aesthetic properties, his slick images implicate corporate culture, national identity and contemporary art in his cleverly coded conspiracy theories.
Johannes Wohnseifer uses the language of consumerism as a means to sign-post personal identification within a contemporary zeitgeist. His slick designs suggest corporate culture, national identity and art history, re-mastering their aesthetic properties as coded conspiracy theories. In Behind the Stripes, Wohnseifer’s image makes ironic reference to conceptual painting. Appropriating the colours of Olt Aicher’s design scheme for the 1972 Munich Olympics, Wohnseifer infuses his logo with implied menace. Through the impersonality of media-style messaging, Wohnseifer draws autobiographical significance, citing the interrupted broadcast of the games as his earliest television memory.